Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 1
CAREERS IN ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, and CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
There is no single, cut-and-dried career path in these fields as there is in, for example,
some engineering fields. Given the rapidly changing nature of employment in conservation and
environmental biology, together with the attitude of most field biologists towards bureaucracy
and regulation, it’s not likely that there will be such a cut-and-dried path to jobs, at least not in
the near future. There are jobs out there, especially in applied areas, but there’s no simple
formula for finding and getting them. Here are some general suggestions for finding and getting
such jobs.
• The Natural Sciences Career Services office provides help with preparing resumes and cover
letters, and doing an interview.
• Choose your courses carefully, to match your scientific interests and career goals. Use
courses to help define your interests and career goals. See the section entitled ‘Selecting
courses.’
• Accumulate skills as well as knowledge. Many entry-level jobs require skills such as
identifying plants or animals, using maps and GIS systems, writing, and producing graphics.
Practical skills such as driving on unpaved roads, changing a tire, simple carpentry, first aid, and
constructing fencing are also valued by employers.
• Academic careers require advanced degrees. See the section entitled ‘Some thoughts on
choosing a graduate school’.
• Without an advanced degree, you may be able to work as a research assistant. Even if you
only clean fish tanks, such a job is an excellent way to obtain experience that will prepare you
for another job — and help persuade someone else to hire you.
• Most non-academic jobs for conservation biologists and other environmental biologists
are with government agencies or with environmental consulting firms. A few are with
companies large enough to have their own ‘in-house’ staff to help them meet environmental
regulations instead of contracting with consulting firms.
• NGOs (non-governmental organizations) rarely hire ‘on the open market’, because they usually
have a pool of volunteers to hire from. If a job with an NGO like the Nature Conservancy or
Greenpeace is your goal, start volunteering now.
• Volunteering is an excellent way to get the experience that will persuade a governmental
agency or private company to hire you. In addition to the NGOs, many governmental agencies
have positions for volunteers. For example, in Austin volunteers are needed by Wild Basin
(public education, trail maintenance, etc.; 327-7622); by the Wildflower Center (tour guides,
greenhouse and garden assistants, etc.; 292-4200); by the Austin Parks and Recreation
Department, especially the Nature Center (public education, care for animals, etc.; 327-2672)
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 2
and the Nature Preserves (trail maintenance, etc.; 327-8180). Most government agencies can
accept volunteers — ask the employee with whom you would like to work.
• Consider your first jobs as an investment in your career. If you want a career as an
environmental consultant, for example, it’s better to work for minimum wage one summer
planting grass to restore a marsh than to earn twice as much (in air-conditioning!) waiting tables
or selling clothes. Jobs that give you experience, that teach you about the sorts of careers
available in your field, and that help you identify your interests and career goals are well worth
the short-term financial ‘loss’ of lower pay. Don’t disdain clerical jobs if they give you a chance
to gain experience and information. Want to be an environmental lawyer? Try to get a job as a
runner or file clerk in a law office. Considering an academic job? Do an independent research
project with a professor, or work as a research technician, even if it’s only washing glassware.
And so on.
• All sorts of government agencies employee biologists. For example, you probably think of
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department when you think of a state job, but conservation biologists
and other environmental biologists are also employed by the state of Texas in the General Land
Office (dredging, coastal land use), Railroad Commission (mine reclamation and revegetation),
Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (air and water pollution), Department of
Transportation (highway right-of-way vegetation), and the Department of Agriculture. At the
federal level, you probably think of the National Park Service or the Fish and Wildlife Service,
but biologists are also employed by the Department of Defense (to manage natural resources on
bases, for example), the Army Core of Engineers (to restore the Everglades, for example), the
Department of Energy (energy-related environmental problems, especially at DOE sites like
Hanford and Rocky Flats), and many others.
• Consulting firms usually earn money by being hired to help clients meet environmental
regulations.
• Learn all you can about potential employers: What do they do? Where is it done? What
sorts of credentials, training, and skills do they need in their employees? what do their
employees do? And, most important, what can you do that will help them get their job done?
Never go into an interview ‘cold’. Finding out the answers to these questions before the
interview is excellent preparation for the interview.
• Most people are quite willing to talk about what they do, what their company or agency
does, and what its other employees do, especially if you ask politely, are considerate of their
time, and have first done some investigation on your own. So ask them! You need not wait until
they are hiring. You are asking for career guidance, not a specific job.
• The Undergraduate Library and PCL have collections of books about environmental careers.
Some of them are on the regular shelves, some are in the library-use-only reference collection.
Look under call numbers that begin with TD 170 ...., HF 5382.75 U6 ....., and GE 60 ......
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 3
SOME THOUGHTS ON CHOOSING A GRADUATE SCHOOL
by Dr. N. Fowler
Before you can choose a grad school, you must clarify your career goals and your area of
specialization.
• Your undergraduate classes will give you some ideas about your goals and interests.
• An independent research project may be useful in this context, especially if you are
considering a research degree.
• Most of you have to have paid jobs; try to get jobs, both during college and between
college and grad school, that give you a look at careers in which you may be interested. If you
think you want to do water quality work, for example, better a poorly paid position washing
glassware in a water quality testing lab (private or government agency) than a better paid
position in a mall clothing store.
• Take every opportunity to talk to anyone with a job of a type in which you might be
interested, or with a job working with people in an interesting area (your Aunt Susan, who is a
secretary at a law firm that does some environmental law?). You don’t have to be a job
applicant to make an appointment to ask someone about their organization and their job; people
may even be flattered to be asked for advice. Just be aware that they are probably very busy.
• Volunteering is an excellent way to get a look at some types of environmental jobs, and
non-profit organizations always need volunteers. Volunteers can do everything from trail
maintenance to political lobbying to research to teaching children to an occasional hour of office
filing. Even if the task isn’t what you want to spend your life doing, it will expose you to
potential jobs and to people who can tell you about specific careers.
• If you are trying to narrow down specific academic interests, a good way is to read
abstracts and titles of articles in the primary scientific journals in the field (Ecology, for
example); read the article when you find one that is interesting. Read review articles,
symposium volumes, even semi-popular material. Read, read, read.
• Take advantage of public lectures, on and off campus.
• Teach yourself as much as you can about plants, animals, geology, soils, ..... Get
yourself a set of field guides, get outdoors as much as you can, and use them.
• Don’t pass up opportunities to learn other skills, in and out of classes. They may be the
skills that get you your first, entry-level position. GIS, computer skills, Spanish, and plant
identification are examples of such skills. Other skills that might help you get a job, and
certainly can help you in a job, include such things as first-aid, fence-building, simple carpentry,
basic vehicle maintenance (can you change a flat tire?), using a map to go cross-country without
a trail, and what to take along for a hike with 8 kids.
There are two different types of graduate programs.
(1) Professional training. Professional training is usually, though not always, obtained
through the acquisition of a professional (or 'terminal') master's degree program. These
programs always include course work and may or may not include a research project. Such
programs are most commonly offered by departments of forestry, fisheries, wildlife biology, and
so on. Essentially, law schools and schools of public administration like the LBJ school offer the
same type of professional training, although the name of the degree differs. Such programs are
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 4
designed to prepare students for specific kinds of jobs.
(2) Research/teaching. These programs are designed to prepare students to conduct
independent scientific research and to teach college students and graduate students. However,
some graduates of such programs take jobs with government agencies, private companies, or
NGOs (non-governmental organizations). These programs include both course work and an
independent research project. The usual degree is the Ph.D. It is usually not necessary to obtain
an M.S. first. These programs are most commonly offered by departments of biology,
ecology/evolution, zoology, or botany.
But note: You can't always tell what kind of degree a person is getting by the name of the
department or even the degree they are earning.
Also note: Despite the above, there is a role for the research-oriented M.S. degree. It is
especially useful for the student whose undergraduate training is deficient, or whose interests are
not sufficiently well-defined to embark on a Ph.D.
Choosing a program
• If you are planning to obtain professional training, find out what degrees people
generally have in your chosen field.
• For professional training, but not for research training, it is a good idea to train in the
part of the country in which you want to be employed. If you want to manage southern pine
forests, get your degree from a south-eastern forestry school, not from the University of
Washington.
• Jobs at primarily teaching institutions often go to people who are already located in the
area. The more selective the institution, the more likely they are to do a truly national search to
fill positions. Tenure-track positions in science departments at major research universities are
virtually never given to graduates of that institution. These positions are filled with an
international search. Going to Major Research University X will just about guarantee that you
won’t be a professor there. (Spouses and future spouses of professors, take note.)
• The choice of a research program should be mostly the selection of a particular
professor whom you want to have as your supervising professor. (Sometimes we say, ‘the
choice of a lab’, which means the same thing.) You know what you are interested in, right?
Identify the laboratories (professors) working in that specific area. Read their papers, then write
to them describing your interests and background, perhaps outlining some possible research
projects. Find out if they have room for you in their lab. Find out everything you can about
them: Are there other graduate students in the lab to interact with, but not so many you will feel
lost? Is the professor actively involved in presenting papers at national meetings and so on, but
not so busy he or she is never in town? But most important, are they and their students (and
postdocs) actively doing top-quality research now? Obviously, to choose a professor in this
way, you must have identified your scientific interests very precisely. For example, ‘plant
ecology’ or ‘animal behavioral ecology’ aren’t specific enough; ‘the effects of herbivores on
plant populations’ or ‘the role of kin selection in the evolution of mating behavior in fish’ are
sufficiently specific.
While your supervising professor is the most important consideration in choosing a
research program, you also want to be in a program that provides a good general training in
ecology (or evolution, or whatever). You also want to have more than one professor providing
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 5
advice and feedback.
• Can you get into the program to which you are applying? Be optimistic, but hedge your
bets, too. No matter how good your record, they may not have room for you that year.
• Can they fund you? Often this takes the form of teaching assistantships. You are very
unlikely to find someone to pay you, an untrained first-year student, to go live in the tropics and
do your own research. Of course you have to have enough money coming in, from all sources,
to eat and keep a roof over your head. But remember that this is an investment in your entire
future career. The graduate school with the best TA salary now is not necessarily the one that
has the lab that will give you the best chance at the best jobs later.
• Regardless of whether you are doing a research degree or professional training, it is a
poor idea to do it in the same institution where you did your undergraduate work. You will get a
much better training if you get the different perspective on the field provided by going to a
different institution. For this reason, most professors refuse to admit an undergraduate from their
institution to their labs.
Some more information about academic jobs.
• A post-doctoral position (a ‘postdoc’) is now virtually mandatory for tenure-track
positions. It is 1-3 yrs of low-paid research-only employment. Sometimes it is necessary and/or
desirable to do more than one postdoc. Count on going to a university different from the one
where you did your Ph.D.
• With luck and a strong record, after a post-doc one gets a ‘tenure-track’ position as an
assistant professor. Tenure is awarded to about half of assistant professors after a grueling 5-6
year period of proving themselves. Tenure-track and tenured positions require a mixture of
teaching, research, administration of a lab, grant-writing, and student-related tasks like
admissions and advising. Institutions vary widely in the ratio of teaching-related to researchrelated responsibilities. Regardless of the ratio, the stress may be high; positions in teaching
colleges are by no means free of heavy work loads and demanding tasks. Like almost all
professionals and managers in the US, professors take work home and work on weekends.
• There are also non-tenure-track academic teaching jobs, usually considered less
desirable than assistant professorships. There are very few research-only academic jobs. Landgrant schools (i.e., ‘ag schools’ like Texas A&M and Texas Tech) have some positions that
substitute Extension Service work for some or all of one’s teaching.
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 6
SOME THOUGHTS ON CAREERS IN CONSERVATION BIOLOGY
by T. Engels, Ph.D.
Dr. Engels has worked as an environmental biologist for a small private consulting firm, for a
large strip-mining company, for the City of Austin, and most recently for a company that has a
large contract with NASA. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology at UT, where
he studied the effects of urban development on the endangered golden-cheeked warbler.
Types of jobs
There are four major types of employment for conservation biologists: in academia, in
the public sector, as a private consultant, and in industry. Each of these have both positive and
negative aspects. The one constant is that the nature of jobs is changing, and will continue to
change, in all of them; the only constant in this field is continuous change.
Jobs in academia. These jobs usually require that you have a Ph.D. A few community colleges
will hire people with only an M.S. degree. Most universities and many colleges will require
postdoctoral research experience as well (a ‘postdoc’) for all permanent appointments.
Community colleges and some smaller colleges will not require a postdoc; these instead look for
people with prior college teaching experience, generally acquired as a temporary lecturer.
In most academic jobs, people are evaluated by the quality and quantity of scientific
articles they publish, and therefore by their research. This generally requires obtaining grants to
support the research, as well as actually conducting the research and writing it up.
Pro’s: • freedom to choose research questions (within funding constraints)
• a stimulating intellectual environment
• a relatively unstructured day-to-day schedule
Con’s: • a relatively unstructured day-to-day schedule
• dependence on grants, which are getting harder to obtain
• the pressures of “publish-or-perish”
• the long time lag between beginning a project and getting rewarded for it
• dealing with reviewers’ often harsh criticisms
Regulatory jobs in the public sector. Most public sector jobs have as their goal making sure that
environmental laws and regulations are followed. These jobs may also involve developing
regulations.
Pro’s: • working on behalf of the public to protect the environment
• work hours often more regular than in other jobs
• less likely to be expected to work more than 40 hrs per week
• pay structure predictable and well-defined
Con’s: • jobs can become repetitive, doing the same thing every day
• little chance to get credit (or blame) for individual work, because letters and
reports go out signed by ‘the agency’
• specialization can become extreme
• pay structure usually doesn’t reflect individual achievements well
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 7
Other public sector jobs (i.e, managers of public land) exist but are not discussed here, being
outside my personal experience.
Environmental consultants help people understand what they are doing to the environment, and
environmental laws and regulations. Employment ranges from very large firms to firms that
have only 2 or 3 employees; one can also be self-employed. Environmental consultants are hired
by clients, such as landowners and small companies. The amount and type of work available is
‘regulation-driven’.
Pro’s: • a wide variety of tasks, with no two days the same
• pay scales are unstructured and vary widely; earnings often directly related to
the amount of money recently earned from contracts with clients
• the opportunity to develop new contracts (identifying clients and persuading
them to hire you or your company)
• the opportunity to learn about new fields, often far from one’s original training
Con’s: • pay scales unstructured; earnings often unpredictable
• hours irregular and unpredictable; may be away from home for 2 weeks on short
notice; work is likely to be slack in the winter and crazy in the spring
• the responsibility for developing new contracts
• you are usually unable to make the ‘final’ decision; that is left to the client. It
can be frustrating to have no control over the final decision-making process.
Jobs in industry. Larger companies will hire environmental biologists to help the company
comply with environmental laws and regulations. Their tasks are similar to those of
environmental consultants.
Pro’s: • fast-paced, never dull
• clear accountability; individual achievements are identified
• rapid rewards (and penalties)
Con’s: • fast-paced, stressful
• expectation of working long hours whenever the current crisis requires it
Jobs with non-governmental organizations (NGO’s). A few environmental biologists have jobs
with non-profit environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and Save our Springs.
Pro’s: • the satisfaction of working for a cause you believe in, and of working directly on
environmental problems
• may have considerable opportunities for individual initiatives
Con’s: • low pay
• frustration with the political process, limited success, and political compromises
• very low job security, due to uncertainty of funding
• fund-raising (unless you enjoy this aspect of the job)
Conservation Biology (Bio 375). Careers and graduate school, p. 8
Preparing for your career
One good way to start today to prepare for a career in conservation biology is to
volunteer, even just 1 day per month, for an NGO or perhaps a public agency. You will start to
find out what you like to do, and start making connections with people who will eventually be
sources of employment.
It’s easier to decide what you like to do when you’re not in school. After you get your
B.S., invest a few years in jobs that will help you decide what you want to do. Your first job is
not a life-long commitment!
Two skills that you can get from your courses are particularly important: statistics and
writing.
• Learn how to write clearly and concisely; it is critical in all jobs.
• The most valuable single course that I took at UT was statistics. All job routes use it. It
will make you a valuable employee. Statistics will teach you how to design and how to evaluate
studies.
I also took a full set of biology courses, which have of course been very useful. If I had it
to do over again, I would take a course in soils and one in geology. Both subjects are useful in
dealing with ground water quality, a big part of environmental consulting.